A Better Source for Harry’s Gangrene: Medical Literature and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”

Scholarship shows that Hemingway translated some of what he read in the Journal of the American Medical Association during the spring of 1919 into fiction written across the 1920s. Roger Pearson hypothesized that this JAMA reading also provided source material for descriptions of the writer Harry’s gangrene in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” written in 1936. However, textual analysis shows that Hemingway used other medical literature in composing the story. This finding further illuminates Hemingway’s use of source materials in writing “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and it offers an opportunity to reassess Harry’s behavior in the story.